The motion is that given the lack of satisfactory information providing assurance to the committee that the employee compensation delivery system is functioning as it should, and given the number of errors reported by government employees in the recent past, the chair be authorized to send a letter to the Auditor General asking her to examine this file and make recommendations as to how federal public employees can be paid properly and on time.

I would like to respond to that. If the Auditor General comes here as an invited guest, she can only say “Oh, is that so?” She is the expert. She should look into it. All we can do is tell her what we've heard here. But she needs to get into the heart of it and find out what the problem is. I don't think she can contribute. She probably could; she's a smart lady.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you to the witnesses for appearing today.

It's pretty obvious that we have a very complex situation. You mentioned the 70,000 rules and regulations and the 10,000 pages, and on and on. Earlier this week we had someone from Treasury Board Secretariat outline two very simple differentiations as to how this is working. One is a generalist—the pay advisor cares for all the different activities—and one is a specialist: it's farmed out, so to speak, to different specialists. It seems rather contradictory to me that on one hand, I think I heard Madame Melançon say, your advisors want to do all of it, and yet you have 70,000 regulations for that one person to do all of it. Help me understand why it wouldn't be helpful to have one person specializing on one issue and another on another. I'm just having trouble understanding that.

I know this is surprising to you, but most of us, the compensation advisors, the people I know, are very hard-working people. We care about giving excellent service. We don't believe in your calling this telephone line and getting a ticket number.

Yes. And I know employees.... I know a compensation advisor who works at PWGSC and she is working right now on specific actings, overtime for employees. She had this employee ask, “Could you prepare a pension estimate for me if I wish to retire in three months?” And she was going to do it, because she believes in giving good service. She's from my department. She transferred there. And she was told, “Don't you dare. You are not allowed to do this. She's going to have to be given a ticket number and it's another section doing that, and that's it and that's all.”

Can I add something to that too? I think the problem with when those are prepared, and we've run into this often, is that people don't understand the complexity of the work we do and they assume that all these things are unrelated. They're not unrelated at all. And as I mentioned earlier, in the departments that have gone that route, that's where the chaos is.

So it looks like, when you look at this, why would you not want to do that?

In your submission you mention under number 3 that an independent classification officer looked at the case in 2003 and would have reclassified you from AS-2 to AS-5. Could you help me understand what the difference is in terms of compensation between those two levels? Could you give me a range?